Conventional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems allow a customer information record to be used in inbound order processing and/or standard order creation to present a one-to-one relationship between a non-configurable customer-defined part number and a vendor-defined part number. This conventional technique, however, is not viable if the products are configurable because configurable objects in the customer's variant configuration structure are not associated with configurable objects in the vendor's type-model-feature structure in a one-to-one correspondence. Further, special manufacturing instructions in a customer order can be addressed by known ERP solutions only by inflexible techniques that are cumbersome to develop and maintain. Thus, there exists a need to overcome at least one of the preceding deficiencies and limitations of the related art.